Monday, December 28, 2015

When ex-Mayor Nutter announced that it was his wish that he could ban
Donald Trump from the City of Philadelphia, he was jumping on a bandwagon. This “stoning”
brigade of numerous city mayors and prominent citizens were saying that because
Trump’s views are annoying or “dangerous” he should be silenced forever.
Nowhere was this boisterous campaign more evident than on Facebook, where many
users announced that they would “unfriend” FB friends who find something about
the man to admire.

Okay, we know that Mayor Nutter’s wish to
ban Trump from the city was just a wicked fantasy. It was also his last hurrah
in terms of getting national attention. But cities, after all, are not medieval
fortresses with walls. You can’t keep out people out with unpopular or
outrageous views. Philadelphia can’t even keep the homeless or repeat offender
criminals outside city limits. Keeping Trump out of the city would just draw
attention to his policies and win him more supporters.

Do I like Donald Trump? No, but that’s not
the point. I would mock any mayor who made similar fantasy announcements about
banning Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton or filmmaker Michael Moore from their
cities. Banning people, ideas—and yes, books-- have never been a good idea, not
by right wingers nor by the left wing “empathetically correct” crowd. Empathetically correct, in case you don’t
know, is the new buzzword for the old term, ‘politically correct,’ meaning the NannyState folks who want to protect us from ourselves. The
Nannies want to ban horse and buggies from New York’s Central
Park, Big Gulp sodas from
NYC and prohibit tobacco sales to military personnel. They have even combed the
English language for unacceptable words and titles. A small sample: A jailer is
now a custodial artist; a housewife is a domestic engineer; a jungle is a rain
forest; a trailer park is a mobile home community; a broken home has become a
dysfunctional family and a shy person is now conversationally selective. And it gets worse…

The growing polarization of American society
based on politics is a worrisome development. Polarization based on political
beliefs is ultimately artificial because status quo politics never lasts but is
always replaced by new politics and ideas. Politicians, however loved or hated,
come and go like a flashing meteorite racing across the sky. Furthermore, no
one candidate ever has all the right answers to the issues of the day. Political candidates are like sloppily made BLT sandwiches with different parts falling out during the eating process.
One can love some of Hilary Clinton (the lettuce?), parts of Bernie Sanders
(the mayo?), and, yes—shockingly-- even a small segment of Donald Trump (the
bacon?) but rarely is the entire sandwich a supreme delight. How many decades
now have most Americans been voting for “the lesser of two evils?”

Today’s polarized political environment
encourages us to vilify a candidate if one or two of their ideas impress most
people as “obnoxious.” Trump is not necessarily evil because he questions
President Obama’s policies on immigration or because some in the media accuse
him of Islamophobia. Because Trump may be clueless about certain issues doesn’t
mean that he is evil, just as the shameless lengths that Hilary Clinton will go
to acquire votes doesn’t make her evil either.

Republican candidate Marco Rubio may be
obnoxious when he promises to roll back all Obama-generated pro LGBT
legislation if elected, but calling him Satan or wishing him dead because of
this one position is beyond the pale. This is not the way we do “business” in America. In many ways, we have become a nation of screaming
hysterics. In a war of orthodoxies, nobody ever wins.

Some Trump vilification Facebook postings
wish the candidate dead while others depict him as a pig or as a men’s room
urinal. These postings have a virtual
village stoning aspect to them in which FB friends can pick up rocks and have a
whack. This fever “conspiracy” to vilify assumes the frenzy of a group orgy or
witch burning but in the end these attacks are boring and repetitive.

It’s the same way with the hyper, obsessive
anti-Obama folks, whose hatred of the President borders on the pathological. It
doesn’t matter what the president says or does, for these people he’s always
wrong, always evil and always anti-American. The personal attacks even include
the First Lady and the Obama children.
How whole groups of people can live and breathe hatred like this, day in
and day out, is a mystery to me.

In the last mayoral election—a shocking
admission! -- I voted for the Republican candidate because I resented the
Democratic machine control of Philadelphia. Municipal elections in the QuakerCity tend to be farcical because Democrats always win,
whether the Democrat’s name is Jim Kenney, Ira Einhorn, sex columnist Dan
Savage, Jihad Jane or Mr. Corrupt Parking Authority.

The automatic canceling out of any
Philadelphia Republican no matter how honorable he or she may be, decade after decade,
cannot be good for the city. Obsessive one Party voting gives one political
party too much power and a fat “chewing” cushion besides. I voted for the GOP
candidate as a symbolic protest even though I like many of Kenney’s ideas.

My one big “left wing” reservation is
the rising tendency in that camp to be intolerant of opposing views, which
brings us back to the ‘banning’ question.

Conservatives on Facebook rarely if ever
advocate unfriending ‘friends’ who advocate liberal positions or who support
candidates that inspire conservative wrath.
Today the big censors of public thought and language are liberals.
Witness how once common (and acceptable) terms like ‘illegal immigrant’ and
‘illegal aliens’ have been replaced by benign (and soft) labels terms like
undocumented worker, or in some cases just immigrant, which leaves out the most
important part: legal or illegal.

Banning ideas and books used to come from
puritanical, right wing quarters. In the modern age there was the banning of James
Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the greatest
novels ever written. At various times in the 1920s the book was banned in the United States, Ireland, Canada and England because it was thought to be obscene.

Right wing puritans also banned Henry
Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, published
by Grove Press in 1961, the story of Miller’s life in Paris as a struggling scribe. Miller wrote about sexual
love in explicit terms and this led to obscenity trials and police raids on
bookstores.

William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch caused a sensation when it was published by Olympia
Press in 1959. The novel, about drug use and homosexuality, was banned in Boston and Los Angeles.

Right wing puritans challenged Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, about a
Jewish family hiding from Nazis in the Netherlands, because of the book’s sexually explicit passages.

Conservative puritans in Culver City, California banned Little
Red Riding Hood from schools because some officials were irked that Mrs.
Hood was shown carrying around a bottle of wine in her basket. As one Culver City educator complained, “Showing the grandmother who has
consumed half a bottle of wine with a red nose is not a lesson we want to
teach.”

In New Hampshire, conservative school puritans banned William Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night because it was about a
girl who disguises herself as a page (boy) and then falls in love with her male
employer. The cross-dressing and the faux same sex romance in the story made
school officials uneasy.

Right wing ideologue puritans in a small California town banned Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes series because Jane
and Tarzan were not married. Imagine that!

Conservatives in one North CarolinaCounty banned Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which deals with the ugliness of racial
discrimination because one parent of a student in the County wrote a 12-page
protest. The parent hated the book because of its sexual content, its “lack of
innocence,” and because it was written in the first person and seemed “too
real.”

Liberal puritans banned Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
published in 1885, at a Quaker school in MontgomeryCounty because a small handful of students complained that
the use of the ‘N’ word throughout the text made them feel “uncomfortable.” The
book is about the friendship of a young white boy with an older black man. The use of the word ‘uncomfortable’ is
interesting here. Education and learning are supposed to make students feel
uncomfortable because that’s what mental growth involves. To be comfortable is
to stagnate. If education and learning is too comfortable, it’s not doing its
job.

The “empathetically correct,’ go to great
lengths to protect students from their own individual sensitivities. This is
why speakers with controversial views can be banned from college campuses, as
if the students were not mentally equipped to challenge these ideas or
“process” them. Sometimes when students
threaten violence at these speaking events the college cancels the speaker out
of fear and intimidation. Ann Coulter,
author of Adios America, The Left’s
Plan to Turn America into a Third
World Hellhole, was banned from
speaking at the University of Toronto because of angry student protests that started to form. So much for
engaging dialogue and an intelligent exchange of ideas!

Novels like JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are being replaced
in liberal schools by so called informational texts.” Additionally, 70 percent
of the books proscribed to students now tend to be non-fiction. One educator
complained that “Imaginative reading and creativity is going out of English
classes.”

Neil Postman, in citing George Orwell’s 1984, wrote,

Orwell warns that we
will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their
autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their
oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

If we
lose the capacity to think, we’re through as a culture—and a nation.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

So there was my Uncle Francis lying on his
stomach in his Girard
Street apartment.
I knew I’d gotten into his place some way though I can’t remember how. How I
get from place to place sometimes can be a blur. My father blames this on drinking… too many
beers and too many beers in the wrong places so that I black out or just fall
apart. Like the time I collapsed near Johnny Brenda’s and Uncle Francis had to come and get me. So I am used to not knowing where I am. In
fact, I don’t even remember walking through Uncle Francis’ front door or even
if he buzzed me in or not, but whatever happened I wound up standing in his
bedroom doorway watching him sleep. How late was it? Maybe 3 or 4 in the
morning, the bewitching hours, the hour of the wolf… The apartment was quiet
except for the sound of passing traffic and the couple upstairs. Why are they
so loud? Don’t they ever give it a rest?

“Hello, hello, it’s Dan!”

Why wasn’t Uncle Francis waking up?
Usually when I’m here he’s walks around or sits on his sofa and reads and then
he puts on a pot of coffee because he knows I love coffee. But he wasn’t
budging this time and I was afraid that something was wrong. Was he sick again?
Or could this be something worse?

I thought if I relaxed in his living room
for a while he would wake up in time. Because of his bad heart I didn’t want to
wake him out of a deep sleep. I felt I needed to sit and rest anyway because I
was having thoughts of my mother who died last month. It was Uncle Francis who
broke the news of her death to me, and this must have been hard for him. He
knew how close I was to mother. She’d been sick for so long. She died while I
was on the Market Street El coming in from 69th Street. I was heading to Uncle Francis’ place. While I was
en route mother died, so my father called Uncle Francis and told him the news
so that he could tell me.

When I arrived at Uncle Francis’ he sat me
down and told me that mother had died. I
called my father after that and cried and then uncle walked me back to the El. The
rest of the month was a blur. I did not want to live.

“Uncle Francis, wake up sleepy head!”

If he can’t hear then we have a problem.
“Hey lazy bones, snicklefrit, get the hell up!”
That’s what he always called me when I was a boy, snicklefrit, little
snicklefrit. Crazy, huh? We do funny things in our crazy Irish family. Like we have aunts who drink only tea and who
hate alcohol and then we have uncles who hate tea and call those aunts who hate
alcohol old maids. Mother liked Old Fashions and Manhattans but her sister
disapproved of alcohol and drank Arctic Splash and Seltzer water. She even had
a alcohol-free wedding and expected everyone to come and have a good time. “It
was so Mennonite,” my mother told me. “The worst wedding I’ve ever attended.
The only spicy thing about it was the onions in the salad.”

I started to think, “I have to stop thinking
about waking him up! Why don’t I just crash on his sofa and sleep till morning,
when we can both go out for bacon and eggs at Paradise restaurant.”

But I found it hard to sit still so I
paced the living room until I was looking out the big window that faced Girard Avenue where you can see everything and everyone, joggers,
taxis, vagrants, the methadone people, hipsters. I noticed how messy the living room was. This
was untypical of Uncle Francis. He had a book of poems lying about and there were
two pictures of me propped up behind a crucifix. God, I’d never seen that
before. Uncle Francis was not religious. The
Philadelphia Inquirer was open on his dining room table and I could see
that he had a news story circled in black.
Beside it was a small tablet and it looked as if before bed he’d been
taking notes. I could have read it if I
wanted to but I was feeling impatient and didn’t want to turn on the
lights. I tried to sleep again but that
didn’t work. I finally realized that the only thing to stop the restlessness
was to go into uncle’s bedroom and wake him up, maybe shake his bed or even
jump into it like I did when I was a kid.

“Hey uncle, here I
come!” I gave his mattress a tug, but
nothing. I gave it another tug and still
nothing.

I thought, “This isn’t good. He’s not
moving. For a moment I was afraid that I’d given him a heart attack but then I
took his right arm and moved it snug against his body. I repositioned his right
arm by bending it at the elbow a bit.

“Uncle Snickelfrit!”

I started thinking about how God had
taken my mother away from me and now what if He had done the same thing with
Uncle Francis? I’d have nobody to talk to. Two loved ones in one month! There
was this sense of urgency about waking him up. I knew I had to act fast and
that time was running out.

“Uncle Francis please get up,” I said,
tugging at his hair. Then I saw him move. He scratched his head where I had
touched it. “Uncle,” I said again, patting him on the forehead, but with this
he turned over in his sleep, snored, made a coughing noise but then opened his
eyes. He looked straight at me but then went to sleep again…. One of his crazy
jokes…

I wondered if he’d been drinking, so I
went into the living room and checked what he had in the refrigerator. I
spotted a half empty bottle of Jamison. I went to pour myself a small glass
because I knew that Uncle wouldn’t mind, but when I went to drink it I didn’t
feel anything.

The whole night was screwed up. First, I
didn’t even know how I got here; second, Uncle didn’t even know I was there,
and then I couldn’t even feel the booze.

I reached for a smoke in my trouser
pocket but noticed that I didn’t have any, then I checked the apartment for a
cigarette, searching behind the sofa cushions because when I visit I was always
plenty of lose stuff there. When I didn’t find anything, I went back to the
dining room table and thought about reading The
Inquirer article that Uncle had circled in black.

I started thinking how I hated life and
how life was not fair. What if Uncle Francis is getting ready to die? “This
can’t be happening,” I thought, “I will dive into the bed and land on top of
him and then slap his forehead to wake him up.” I did just that, slapping him
lightly on the forehead and then, surprise, surprise, he did sit up in bed with
a look of terror on his face. He looked around and then directly into my face
but he didn’t seem to be seeing anything at all.

“Who’s there?” he said, placing his hand
over his ailing heart.

We looked at one another but there was still
no reaction. Then he struggled to get out of bed and limped around the
apartment. He walked past me. What is
wrong? I ran up to him again but he didn’t notice.

“Uncle Francis!”

I slipped into his bed and curled up
under the covers but when he came back he laid down on top of me. He was on top
of me but I feel nothing. I just slipped out from under him. He felt something
and he called my name and asked me to stop.

“Please stop!”

He can see me but he can’t see me?

Finally, he got out of bed and walked to the
dining room table where he switched on a small lamp and began to look at the
article circled in black. I read the newspaper standing over his shoulder.

City Cites Pinched Wires In Man's Electrocution

Pinched wires electrified
a city street light that electrocuted a pedestrian Sunday night in University City, city officials said.

Alexander L.
"Pete" Hoskins, the city streets commissioner, said his department
was still investigating how the wires became pinched.

He said the pole, in the
600 block of University
Avenue near the UniversityBridge over the Schuylkill, was knocked down May 28 and repaired the next day. The
pinched, or touching wires, were found near the door leading to the repair box,
he said.

Hoskins said that all
similar lights would be checked as a safety precaution. He said he had no
reason to believe the problem went beyond the one light.

The Medical Examiner's
Office said it had identified the victim as Daniel Joseph Reilly, 23, of the
first block of North
Maple Street in
Lansdowne. Reilly was found with his neck and chin touching the light pole. He
was pulled from the pole by Hoskins.

You can
imagine my dismay and shock when I realized that I had been dead for a week.
While I won’t go into the particulars of my transition, I do have advice for
the living:

Pray for a death that is not sudden, always have
time to prepare, because when you die suddenly as I did on that cold rainy
night in November of 1992, it took a long time before I knew what had happened
to me. I was not warned; nobody took my hand and guided me upwards; I was
alone; there were no angels. And my previously deceased mother did not
immediately come to my side with words of comfort.

There are no armed guards in Tel Aviv’s BenGurionAirport,
at least not on open display. Entering Ben Gurion from the flight arrival area,
it at first seems smaller than other airports until you realize that it fans out
in a series of circles like a string of shopping malls. “So, here,” I
reflected, suitcase in hand, “is the Promised Land of the Bible!” Just what
this Promised Land had to offer would reveal itself to me over the next several
days, the duration of my visit along with four other travel writers, two from
Los Angeles, one from Arizona and one from Quebec City, all of us guests of the
Israeli Tourist Ministry.

Because the El
Al jet ride from Newark had been
less than comfortable, it was my hope that Israeli ‘land life’ would offer
better things. My flight was packed tight with Hassidic Jews, men in hats and
long sideburn curls who carried hat boxes of various sizes who seemed to take
great delight in lounging or blocking seat entrances or pacing around the plane
without letup. For this passenger it was like listening to endless renditions
of Ravel’s Bolero. Everyone in our mostly Jewish press group had El Al horror
stories. On both my arrival and departure flight, for instance, an Orthodox man
refused to sit in his assigned middle seat because there was a woman sitting by
the window. At the end of the day I felt grateful that Jewish Orthodoxy had
provided me with ample leg room.

Once in Tel Aviv, a
driver met me at Ben Gurion and drove me to the Herzelya Ritz Carlton Hotel
where the traffic was five times the density of the Schuylkill Expressway. We
traveled on a special toll road that got you to Herzelya in half the time.
Along the way I took note of the billboards and random graffiti on buildings
and reminded myself that cities the world over are the same when it comes to
urban blight. When we arrived at the
Ritz the world became a Meditereanean luxury spa with a harbor of yachts, an
ocean beach and blue skies. My hotel room overlooked the luxurious harbor.
Management had also arranged a swag surprise: gifts of body lotions and a small
plate of gourmet chocolates. I devoured the chocolates, showered, then took a
walk on the beach and watched as teenagers played Frisbee and two guys in wet
suits surfed in an ocean that reminded me of the surf at the Jersey
shore.

I’ve no doubt that
some people go to Israel
for the food, in this case, salads; salads of every variety with vegetables and
ingredients you’re not likely to have heard of before. The breakfast buffet at
the Ritz was beyond compare, attracting the likes of Tony Blair who rushed past
our table with his security entourage.

“It’s Tony Blair!”
one of the LA writers said, even though all we saw was the back of the former
UK Prime Minister’s head. Blair seemed to be in important business mode. Israel,
after all, is about the size of humble New Jersey
but surrounded by large monolith Arab countries, Jordan
being the most peaceful of the lot unless at some point, as our tour guide
indicated, “It has an Arab spring.” Naturally, fears of possible terrorist
activity during our 5-day whirlwind tour of Tel Aviv, Jaffa,
the Dead Sea and Jerusalem
were very much on our minds. Before
signing up for this press trip, our group had done its homework: An American
tourist stabbed to death in Jerusalem in 2010; an attack on taxi passengers,
all U.S. citizens in 2000; in 2001 a shooting at a bus stop; October, 2015, the
storming of a bus in Jerusalem (3 fatalities); in 2015 a couple and their 4
children were attacked by gunmen in the West Bank. Two days after our press
trip, November 19, 2015,
terrorists open fired on cars stuck in traffic; another attack in the West
Bank where five people, including an 18 year old student from Boston,
were killed.

Prior to my coming
here, for instance, some people had advised me to drop out. They prayed for me
in my local parish church. They told me to be careful. I was even taken out to
dinner and my hosts jokingly referred to it as The Last Supper.

The instructions
from the Ministry were clear: we must remain with our fellow travel writers at
all times. Solitary excursions through Tel Aviv or Jerusalem
were forbidden. The reality of this hit hard after our first dinner out in a
Tel Aviv restaurant when we could not locate the tour bus. We were lingering on
a dark Tel Aviv street. “This cannot be
happening,” a member of our group said, panic evident in her eyes. “We are
standing alone on a dark street in Tel Aviv. A car could come up at any time
and blow us away!” She wasn’t kidding. This was not New
York or Philadelphia
but we had been lulled into momentary complacency with good food and good wine.
Inspired by her words of caution, we high tailed it around the block and
hurried to the parked bus since moving along in a group is better than standing
idle on a street corner, where anything can happen.

Our apprehension
abated somewhat during our first daylight tour: a walk through Jaffa,
the ancient seaport of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans, and the Crusaders.
From its star-studded history—everything from Greek mythology, Jonah and the
Whale to a long stay by Peter the Apostle—we listened as our guide explained
how after the Jews won a local battle here with the Turks, resident Arab
Christians and Muslims were given permission to remain in the city although
newcomer Arabs were not allowed in. Jaffa,
the story goes, was founded by Jacob, one of the sons of Noah after the Great
Flood. When Napoleon came to Jaffa
to fight the Turks and the British his troops contracted the Plague and for the
beleaguered emperor there was only one solution: to have his General surgeon
kill the sick so that the disease would not spread. When the surgeon refused,
saying he was in the business of saving lives, not killing them, Napoleon asked
the Turkish sultan’s General surgeon to do the same thing but got the same
answer. Although there are various stories about how the afflicted soldiers
died, our guide told us that Napoleon walked away and let his troops die in
agony on the vast portico outside the church
of Peter the Apostle.

The church
of Peter the Apostle was built in
1654 and looks much like any cathedral in Europe
although when I snuck a peek I was amazed that it was in total darkness with
tourists milling confusedly about, some walking to the altar while others hung
out near the back pews. It was enough to make your imagination work overtime
and so it occurred to me that this would be a sinister place for terrorism. I
noticed an adult man sneaking up behind a friend of his who was sitting alone
in a pew and watched as he poured bottled spring water onto his friend’s head.
Was this a Monty Python skit making fun of baptism? I left the church shortly
after this.

As for Saint Peter,
when the apostle came to Jaffa he
stayed at the home of Simon the Tanner, a house that is still very much intact.
The scriptures (Acts of the Apostles) tell us that during his stay Peter raised
a woman (Tabitha) from the dead. He also
fell asleep on Simon’s flat roof whereupon he had a series of dreams in which
he was told by the Lord to abolish the old Jewish dietary laws. Peter had to be
told to do three times, but once he enacted the change, the new religion was
able to spread among the pagans. Had the dietary laws not been abolished,
Christianity could have died out as just another Jewish sect.”

Officially
designated as a Health and Wellness press trip, we journalists were treated to
a number of massages. I don’t think we were fearful of terrorism here, although
body lotions could easily be replaced with poisonous substances and do strange
things to the pores. After a spin around
Tel Aviv’s Sheinken Street
and the Carmel open air market,
each of us prepared for our 40 minute rubdown at the Ritz spa. In individual
cubicles filled with sweet aromatic scents, we undressed and were lathered
appropriately with oils and balms, wrapped in hot towels and then set upon by
our assigned body rubbers. In my case it was a talkative Israeli girl who,
because I told her I wanted a firm massage, went to extreme lengths to pummel
my back with road construction drill jerks that had me bouncing off the
mattress. Although she did manage to deliver some pleasant sensations, she
became even more animated when I told her that during much of the rub that in
my mind I kept seeing the face of an infant. Was it her child perhaps? She told
m it was not her child but that when she was massaging me she was thinking of her sister’s new baby. “Are you a medium of some sort?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “but massages send me places.”

There would be two
other massages on the trip. At the Mitzpen Hayamim Hotel Spa and Farm, we
donned white robes and slippers and took turns in the various cubicles for our Sea
of Galilee rubs. My body rubber was a sturdy albeit bullish short
haired woman who was coming to the end of a long day. She did not speak English
but she was adept at pointing, so there was no conversation, no jerking motions
just a methodical but thorough deep tissue application that was heads above the
first. By this time, of course, we had heard about the killings in Paris,
so our group was on high alert. The Mitzpen Hayamim tour guide, after giving us
a tour of the farm, pointed to a not so distant mountain and told us that just
a few weeks prior he had hiked to the top and was able to look over into Syria,
“Where you can see all the carnage down below.”

News of the Paris
killings heightened our apprehension about traveling along the West
Bank to the Dead Sea and into the city of Jerusalem.
Our tour bus, we were told, would waver among zones A, B and C, B and C being
the safe West Bank zones and A being the one to watch
out for. The journalist who wanted us off that Tel Aviv street corner was now
concerned about our entry into Jerusalem.
She told us that she had not even informed her mother that she was taking a
press trip to Israel
because the news “would have given her a heart attack.”

Our bus driver,
a sturdy man with a lot experience driving buses along the West Bank,
Haifa and the JordanValley has had stones and rocks
thrown at his buses. When we entered the West Bank zones
we were careful to avoid the window and sit in the aisle seats. Along the JordanValley the tour guide pointed out Jericho,
the oldest city on earth (and home of John the Baptist) as being an especially
dangerous place. Its small scale very biblical looking skyline seemed too close
for comfort. Looking out the window from a safe distance, I couldn’t keep my
eyes off the desolate Judean wilderness with its mountains and caves that were
once populated by the Essenes, Jewish Zealots and early Christian hermits. I
also took note of the abundance of abandoned tractor or military vehicle wheels
that seemed to dot the landscape every few miles. Periodically we would pass an
Arab settlement and what looked like the remnants of isolated, bombed out
buildings. As we approached Jerusalem
we were greeted with the timeless spectacle of Shepards guiding their flocks of
sheep up and down the sides of mountainous hills.

Our final group
massage occurred near the Dead Sea. In my case I was
told to strip and lay face up on a small table by a tall completely bald man
who reminded me of Yul Brenner. He painted me with a brush in warm Dead
Sea mud and slashed it around like he was swabbing a fence then
wrapped my body like a mummy in two layers of cloth. After that he left the
room without a word of explanation, returning fifteen minutes later with an
order to shower. I was then supposed to float in a rectangular shaped mineral
swimming pool with a group of pot bellied men and their wives, the latter bobbing
about in flowered bathing caps.

Needless to say, I
opted to get dressed and help myself to complimentary tea in the foyer of the
spa.

Followers

About Me

I am a Philadelphia-based author/journalist, the author of nine published books, including: The Cliffs of Aries (1988), Two Novellas: Walking Water & After All This (1989), The Boy on the Bicycle (1991-1994), Manayunk (1997), Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia (2000), Tropic of Libra (2002), Out in History and Philadelphia Architecture (2005)and SPORE (2010). In 1990, Two Novellas was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a Hugo Award. Winner of the 2005 Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Two Novellas rewritten and retitled for Starbooks Press: Walking on Water & After All This, available as an e-book. Winner of the Philadelphia AIA 2005 Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. I am currently the City Beat editor at ICON Magazine, a contributing editor/writer at The Weekly Press, and a weekly columnist (The Local Lens) for Philadelphia’s SPIRIT Community Newspapers. I am the Religion Editor for the Lambda Book Report, and have written for Philadelphia's Broad Street Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News.
www.tnickels.net